Kazakhstan develops road map to attract foreign investment

Kazakhstan is partnering with an international organization and a Russian consulting firm to draw up a plan to attract greater direct foreign investment (FDI).

Kazakh officials from the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies are working with representatives from the international trade body Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Russian consulting firm Strategy Partners to develop a plan to bring foreign funds into the Kazakh economy, the Kazakh news service Novosti Kazakhstan reported on Wednesday.

Together they are developing a “pilot project” to attract the investment, Asylhan Serikov, investment committee chairman at the ministry of industry, told Novosti Kazakhstan on Wednesday. The project will be ready by the end of 2010.

Kazakhstan hopes to attract funds from a variety of countries, including China, Turkey, the U.S., Korea, Japan, Germany and France, Serikov said.

“The agreement is an agreement of a new type, containing the application rules and requirements of national legislation to foreign capital and secure all kinds of restrictions and requirements for a possible change in legislation,” said Serikov.

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev returned last week from a diplomatic tour of Brussels and Paris in which he worked to develop foreign contracts for Kazakh enterprises.

Increased FDI will help Central Asia’s largest economy in its plan to diversify its economy beyond on oil and gas and encourage small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMSEs) to take root in a variety of Kazakh economic sectors.

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Charles van der Leeuw, writer, news analyst, was born in The Hague, The Netherlands, in 1952. He started working as an independent reporter on cultural issues in a wide variety of publications back in 1977. Ten years later, he settled down in war-torn Beirut as an international war correspondent, following a first experience in Iraq in 1985, which resulted in his first book on the Iraq-Iran war. After his kidnapping and release in 1989, his second book “Lebanon – the injured innocence” came out, followed, in early 1992, by “Kuwait burns”. Later in the year, he settled down in Baku, Azerbaijan, as a war correspondent. “Storm over the Caucasus” on the southern Caucasus geopolitical conflicts came out in 1997 in the Dutch language and two years later in the first English edition. It was followed by “Azerbaijan – a quest for identity” and “Oil and gas in the Caucasus and Caspian – a history”, both published in 2000, and “Black & Blue” published in Almaty in summer 2003 about the stormy rise of Russia’s present-day oil and gas companies.
In 2012, he published a bipartite book about the histories of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. His latest publication before this work was “Cold War II: cries in the desert – or how to counterbalance NATO’s propaganda from Ukraine to Central Asia”, published by Herfordshire Press, England, along with books similar to this one on Kyrgyzstan, published in English, French and German editions.